New weebl and bob thingy! w00t!

(Apparently the chap that does these has been hired to make animations for MTV, which is jolly nice.)

From B3ta: Little dogs in kimonos.

I fear them.

WARNING:

*****Major gross-out ahead.****** *****Major gross-out ahead.****** *****Major gross-out ahead.******


EURRRRRGHHHH! Jesus H. Christ in an all-male jaccuzi, what a revolting morning I've had. I got booked in to work a morning shift cleaning up at that bail hostel, right? And everything was going pretty smoothly, until I got to the bathrooms on the third floor.

Basically: Somebody had a bit of a dicky tummy last night and kind of Jackson Pollocked one of the loos. Then they... then they nothing.

They just left it.

To dry.

Into concrete.

I mean, I'm starting a nice clean packing job on Monday; somehow that made it worse.You know in actiony-military type films there's always this bit where the crack team of marines is mired deep in enemy territory, with aliens or robots or foriegn johnnies encroaching on all sides? And one bloke always goes off into one about how close he is to the end of his tour of duty? It was sort of like that. I'm standing there clutching a bog-brush in my rubber-gloved hands and sobbing: "Fourteen days and a wakeup, man! Fourteen days and a wakeup!"

It took me about a quarter of an hour and half a litre of Mr. Shifter to get rid of it. I'm going to start a campaign for cleaners to be issued with flamethrowers, or possibly tactical nukes.

Look, before you start: I know that there are worse jobs in Britain, okay? There are grosser jobs, there are more dangerous jobs, there are jobs that are more poorly paid. I acknowledge this. I plan to offset my whining soon by writing a post or two on the topic of Jobs That Suck Worse Than Mine.

But I still say I'm not getting paid enough to scrape diahrroea pebbledash off of toilets.

Metal Song Title Generator

(From Barbelith.)

"As a dog returneth..."

I'm starting a new booking on Monday. An... ongoing booking. For me, an Ongoing Booking is like the Holy Grail. I call them permatemp jobs: technically temporary, but the boss is likely to need you for the foreseeable future and can't be bothered to recruit someone new. The cherry on the cake is that I know the client, a small but thriving jewellery importer in need of packers. I spent most of last summer with them and they're pretty cool. My agency told me that they asked for me by name, would you believe.

Yeah, I know what you're thinking. You're thinking: Here's a company that wants somebody to stuff toerings in boxes all day, a job which has no requirements beyond a pair of opposable thumbs, and yet they ask for a specific person? If you're thinking that, then you'd suck at doing this job. First off: they need someone who won't assume that "boring" is the same as "unimportant." Second off: They need someone who understands that if you're on a production line, 9:00 am means 9:00 am and not any old time before lunch. Third off: they need someone who isn't stupid enough to try and half-inch the product.

I mean. Seriously.

Here's a simple maths quiz: you're packing cheap little mass-produced silver earring sets that cost about 3p a pair wholesale. You get paid £5 an hour. Given that you will be dismissed without references and very probably arrested if you try to nick anything, how is it ever going to be worth trying to smuggle a couple of earrings past the guy with the metal-detector? Choose one of the following:

A) It's not worth it, stupid. Now pass me another roll of barcode stickers.
b) I don't like this job much, but I'd rather just quit and look for something else than get fired over a few penn'orth of costume jewellery.
?%!) mE Am BizZarrO woRLd rONniE bIgGS! Me aM eAT pAinT! sEll sHIny eARiNgs! BuY moRe PaInT! paINt gOooOd!

So having established that I can do this look-ma-no-brains job without screwing it up, why doesn't the client just cut out the middleman and hire me directly, on a casual basis? Why go through the agency?

Because of the introduction fee. The introduction fee is a sum of money that the client is contractually obliged to pay the agency if they hire someone who's been sent to them by that agency, within a set amount of time (usually 2-3 years). The terms vary between agencies but generally a client is looking at some multiple of the temp's hourly rate. In many cases the minimum fee starts at around £1000 (even for opposable-thumboids like moi). One agency I worked for charged £2000, minimum. This fee means that no matter how hard you work for a client, they'll probably never hire you as a permanent member of staff.

At present, I don't care-- I'm not stopping here anyway, so this deal suits me just fine. When I first moved to London it was different; like many others I wanted nothing more than a permanent job. The phrase "good chance of going perm!" is dangled in front of temps' noses all the time. It's the mechanical hare that they chase after, the inducement to put up with all manner of lousy conditions and rotten behaviour. I'm here to tell you that nine times out of eight, "good chance of going perm!" is a great big lie. Get in early, leave late, take work home, work a twelve hour day for eight hour's pay, none of that matters. If your client can find someone to do what they think you do without coughing up an extra £1000, then they'll hire that person, not you. End of story.

Understand: I'm not saying all this like it's the worst thing that could ever happen to a person. I'm just saying. That's all.

That whole "Blogging = Revolution in Personal Publishing™" thing: Why it's tosh.

Revolution, my infected toenails. How is this a revolution? What exactly is being achieved here? Sure, there's now more opportunity for people to create quality reportage, but are you reading the Weblogs of Righteousness? Are you checking the blogs that have current events, insightful comment, charm, a desire to inform or at least entertain? Are you reading about a friend or family member? No, you're hanging round the grotty pits of weblogging, rubbernecking, waiting to see what the freaks'll do next. Yes, you are. Stop interrupting and face it.

Look! Will you look at this? I'm sorry, but I'm going to have to spring one of those horribly lucid oh-god-I'm-a-tiny-fragment-of-dirt-floating-in-a-void-of-futility moments on your sorry little mind.

You are reading the online journal of an asthmatic, sporadically-employed, shaven-headed, epileptic, Goth cleaner. Picture me wheezing round a gobfull of Monster Munch, picking flakes of black nail-varnish from my manky cuticles; picture me pouring another cheap vodka and generic orange squash to wash down the allergy meds; picture me guffawing at the latest Cruel Site of the Day. And then see yourself, actually sitting in front of your VDU, reading what that person has written.

You have contrived to be sadder than a Goth. You're like, ultra-sad. You're so sad that only dogs can hear it. They're going to harness your sadness as a weapon of mass-destruction.

No, you're not being clever and ironic. No, don't try and deconstruct it. You're not fooling anyone, least of all yourself. Just sit there and let the unutterable pointless lameness of what you're doing seep into your brain until you fall, sobbing and retching, to the floor.

Fotamecus: The Movie!

(Half-inched from betty woo.)

All right, then.

Here! Here's your damned update, you pack of ravening jackals! I hope it chokes you.

I've spent the last few days trying (and mostly failing) to find work. Got a qualification in electronics? You've got two choices: move to Germany or pick up a mop. God help me, I actually found myself reading ads for the Army in a receptive, speculative frame of mind.

In the two weeks since my last booking finished, I have had four (4) hours' work: cleaning, in a bail hostel. And if any of you middle-class superplonk socialists plan to start telling me how there's no shame in honest labour and quoting bits of Fight Club, you'd better have spent at least a few hours of your life scrubbing junkie c**p off of bog seats or batting away the flies as you scrape four inches of green hairy take-away food out of someone else's bin.

That they have had in their room.

Next to their bed.

For weeks on end.

In the middle of summer.

It's not that I don't appreciate the comparative advantages afforded by my decadent Western background, it's just that I'd quite like a job that didn't involve the continual suppression of my gag reflex.

Anyway... the agency have found me work for Monday. I don't know what it is, I don't know how much it pays, and I'm not sure of the hours. I didn't even ask; I just took it. Whatever. I mean, who cares, right? There's only one thing I'm okay at (electronics) and there's only one thing I'm really good at (writing); and apparently you can't get paid for those. Rent's due in a couple of weeks, so pass the bog-brush.

Yeeeeeeeees!

(Via Barbelith.)

Still jobless.

My agency had some litter-picking work going but you needed to supply your own steel toe-capped boots. I do not own any steel toe-capped boots, nor can I afford to buy any. (My boyfriend would like to imagine that I possess steel toe-capped boots, and indeed gets quite disappointed when I tell him that I don't.)

"Aha!" you cry. "But under current legislation, your employer must provide you with any necessary proctive gear! They must render unto you a pair of steel toe-capped boots, or face the consequences!"

But I am not an employee, am I? I'm a temp. According to my contract, which is a standard document that varies little from agency to agency, I am self-employed. Therefore all protective kit is my problem, not the client's. Oh, the joys of a flexible labour market!

DIRK, meanwhile, is a sort of auto-po-playing device, which I found on Interconnected. It explores the fundamental interconnectedness of all things, and is strangely soothing.

Book which you must read.

I've just finished Last and First Men by Olaf Stapleton. You have to read this-- it's a complete headfuck, a revelation. This guy was a visionary. I can't belive he was writing in the 30's.

The book is incredible. It's an attempt to conceptualise the whole future of humanity, civilizations rising and falling, disintegrating and coalescing... it's incredible. There's a terrific sense of a mind trying to reconcile the very worst of human nature with the very best-- and from time to time, actually succeeding.

Why I Hate You, Pt. 10,090

Because you are a vast, I dunno, spongey explody thing of potential and yet you spent your life sitting around wondering if you might possibly be excused from the blatantly ludicrous template within which you have chosen to slot yourselves. Are you? Aren't you? I don't know! Who cares! Let's all have a bun.

2:32 am and haven't found a job.

However, Shashinka has painted her nails, and they look pretty cool. She mentions the Middle East: how ludicrous these girly things are in the face of the world.

I heard an account once; the liberation of a concentration camp. Inamongst the scanty food, the bandages, somebody had given a box of lipsticks. How futile, you say. How silly, how vain. But there were women who rouged their lips and then died still clutching the greasepaint, like a child holding a favorite toy close against the nightmares.

Elsewhere, in space/time: The Egyptians had a fine understanding of wet chemistry, which had its roots largely in the making of eyeshadow and sundry cosmetics. Only recently did we understand the secrets of their blue paint. Small statuettes have been found, ostensibly electroplated, purportedly Ancient Egyptian in origin. A battery is not a hard thing to devise-- nor to forget.

It's the little things in life.

Sliiiiight work warning here:Top 10 Cutest Kittens from B3ta

(You did read the work warning before you clicked the link, didn't you? Oh. Oh, well.)

Tom Coates explains to the Grauniad why their weblog compo is "a bloody stupid idea."

Whilst I'm inclined to agree, I still want the money.

Virus warning: Blank emails containing worms!

Regular punters will recall my concern a few days back that following the huge if brief rise in my hit rate, I might have more than the usual amont of tosh in my inbox. Well, turns out I was right. Apart from an increase in spam I've noticed a worrying number of blank but very large emails. I opened the first couple (duh) because I didn't know what they were. (DUHHHRRRRR!)

Now, until fairly recently, you could avoid virusifying your 'puter by not opening suspicious attachments. However these emails can deliver a worm onto your virtual doorstep just by being opened. They're not that hard to spot: large emails (100 k+) with garbled, nonsensical, or unknown senders, which prove to be blank.

Once again: These are LARGE, apparently BLANK emails, from unknown or garbled senders, with NO attachments. They are NOT safe, they contain WORMS. Be very, VERY vigilant, especially if you use some superweak piece of pantsware like Outlook Express to read your email.

Finally!

Us paranoiacs now have our own version of warchalking-- Let's PSYCHALK!

Although... he mentions the aluminium foil deflector beanie! Oh, no. Major disinfo. Actually, the AFDB works like a faraday cage, focusing your thoughts out round the edges and making it easier for the aliens to read your mind. Argggh! Nowhere is safe!!!

Sick of @!$* personality tests? Want to give your online buddies a little aversion thereapy? The Atomic Temple Online can help you out, with this handy dandy fake quiz. Looks like a personality test, but dumps the unsuspecting testee face-first into a page-full of mullet-pr0n!

(Work warning. Duh.)

"Boeing, the world’s largest aircraft manufacturer, has admitted it is working on experimental anti-gravity projects."

(Via the null device)

Seems like I never have enough time to do all the things I want to do. So I'm going to make some more.

('Course, if Fotemacus would answer my calls I wouldn't have this problem.)